Book Review: The Harvest of Time

The Blurb

After billions of years of imprisonment, the vicious Sild have broken out of confinement. From a ruined world at the end of time, they make preparations to conquer the past, with the ultimate goal of rewriting history. But to achieve their aims they will need to enslave an intellect greater than their own...

On Earth, UNIT is called in to investigate a mysterious incident on a North Sea drilling platform. The Doctor believes something is afoot, and no sooner has the investigation begun when something even stranger takes hold: The Brigadier is starting to forget about UNIT's highest-profile prisoner. And he is not alone in his amnesia.

As the Sild invasion begins, the Doctor faces a terrible dilemma. To save the universe, he must save his arch-nemesis... The Master

Thoughts - 

Let's get some positive stuff out of the way because I'm going to start nit-picking the plot soon. 

All of the regular characters are well written, except perhaps the Doctor but I can't put my finger on what felt off about him, he just didn't feel like the Doctor. The new characters are equally great and we spend a lot of time with one, Eddie McCrimmon. She's a great POV character with interesting motivations and her journey is the core of the book. 

The Sild are a great alien threat, what they lack in power they make up for in sheer numbers, there are some great scenes early on as they take control of some policemen and elderly people on a bus. The action scenes, both in future and on the rig are exciting and well written. Even thought you know Jo and Yates can't die, you really feel like they are in danger. 

Right here we go, the plot and the use of the Master.

The novel starts out as a standard Pertwee UNIT invasion story set around the disappearance of an oil rig and the reveal of creatures from the ocean. So far, so Sea Devils. The really interesting mystery is that people are slowly forgetting who the Master is and that this is seemingly unconnected to the invasion plot. There a several plot strands in the first half of the novel and whilst they will all come together at the end, it felt like it took a bit to long to get there. 

Take the prologue. The Praxillions don't appear in the story again until 200 odd pages later. It seems only worth including this because they appear so late in the narrative, and without the set-up it would seems to be too late a development, and a hefty out of left-field plot dump in the remaining pages of the book. 

Which brings me to my main criticism of the first two thirds of the book, the fact that it is just a retread of UNIT t.v. stories. It is certainly more epic and gory then we would have seen on screen but doesn't feel like the writer has brought enough new ideas to what is a sort of mini-event of a book. You've got an established science fiction writer (who I'll admit I haven't read any of) writing for a Classic Doctor in 2013. You kind of expect something special, which you eventually get, it just takes too many pages to get there. 

Reynolds clearly loves the Master and the book really emphasises how much cleverer the Master is then the Doctor, that he knows how to do things that the Doctor cannot.  Whilst this all works in this story it doesn't really fit with Doctor Who as a whole. If the Master is so clever, why has he never been successful? How come he always loses and ends up in prison? 

Its hard to describe the brilliance of some of the end of the book without spoiling it too much. To be brief, the Sild have a computer made out of lots of different incarnations of the Master. This is an awesome idea but then when you think the story is going to get all Master Wastery, it doesn't. Only the Delgado Master gets to speak or do anything. 

 It made me question why we spent so long on the invasion of earth story if it was building to this great , far more interesting idea which doesn't have enough room to breathe. It also further builds on the idea of the Master being this ultimate genius, which I just couldn't buy into completely, because like I said, the Master has never been this clever in any other story. 

There is also this weird unexplained concept that Master is only evil because of the presence of these other selves. Which I found to be a an odd digression and all the weirder for turning out to be true, and the Doctor doesn't really react to this massive revelation about his old friend. 

We also get a look into the Master and the Doctor's past on Gallifrey which is great and doesn't go too far. It does, however point out that the Time Lords weirdly are absent from a story set during a period where they were omnipresent. 

A final problem is with the end of the story and making the story fit in with continuity.  

Reynolds cleverly had the Master in a different prison at the start, allowing him the freedom to blow it up without it clashing with The Sea Devils. But this comes at the cost of a really ham-fisted ending. 

The story sets up a point where the Doctor could incapacitate him and detain him in the TARDIS but instead chooses to leave him to die on the Sild ship. All of this happens just for the Master to show up gain at the end to say hi (he basically admits this) and he gets recaptured. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth, never a good thing at the end of a story that I had mixed feelings about. 

Doctor Who books tend to feel like an author getting to play with characters they love whilst accepting that they can't really shake things up, kill anyone off or change anything in a big way. Reynolds didn't seem to get that brief or maybe got a bit more leeway because this book has its cake and eats it, it quite literally bends over backwards to fit in with Who history but then redefines the Master at the same time, all the while the reader knows that none of this matters because no other book/episode will ever draw on this again. It seems like it should have been controversial, but 7 years later it seems it will just be ignored instead. 

This a great book, but it doesn't feel like a Doctor Who story. You should read it but you might have mixed feelings about it. 

Rating - 6/10

Book review: The Taking of Chelsea 426

The Blurb - The Chelsea Flower Show - hardly the most exciting or dangerous event in the calendar, or so the Doctor thinks. But this is Chelsea 426, a city-sized future colony floating on the clouds of Saturn, and the flowers are much more than they seem.

As the Doctor investigates, he becomes more and more worried. Who is shopkeeper Mr Pemberton acting so strangely? And what is Professor Wilberforce's terrible secret?

They are close to finding the answers when a familiar foe arrives, and the stakes suddenly get much higher. The Sontarans have plans of their own, they're not here to arrange flowers..

A short summary - The Doctor arrives amongst a small community living on a space station orbiting Saturn. The community doesn't take well to strangers despite relying on tourists, has very strict rules and is described by the children who live there as boring. 

They are about to host a flower show and the star of the show will be Professor Wilberforce's new discovery of plants grown from spores found on Saturn. The Doctor attends the show with two children, Jake and Vienna alongside their mother. 

The plants release spores that possess some of the people including Jake and Vienna's mother. Unbeknown to other the characters, Professor Wilberforce was possessed some time ago and has also infected a few other members of the community. 

The Sontarans arrive, led by General Kade, looking for Rutans. It turns out the the Rutans have converted themselves in spores that were intended to possess newly cloned Sontarans (this whole plan was a response by the Rutans in case the Sontarans had been successful in The Poison Sky). Instead humans have been infected.

Rather then kill everyone, General Kade wants to gather everyone up and gather information. The Doctor finds a cure for the possession and incapacitates the Sontarans long enough to save everyone. 

Convinced his is helping the Rutans, Kade plans to crash the station into Saturn. Fortunatly for the protagonists, Kade and his troops leave before their plan is completed and both the inhabitants and visitors of Chelsea 426 pull together to rescue the station. 

Jake and Vienna's parents decide to leave the station and move back to Earth. The Doctor leaves, off to his next adventure. In a brief coda, it is clear that some of Kade's men have been infected by the spores. 

Thoughts -

I should start by saying that I didn't read this one as a kid. I bought it super cheap recently in paperback, shudder.

I'm glad I didn't get this one sooner. I hope the memory hasn't cheated and all the NSA stories were this juvenile and boring. 

The Sontarans are a cool species in the Whoniverse, akin to the Original Star Trek's Klingons. This version of the Sontarans is really odd. As part of the Intelligence division, they operate differently to Sontarans we've seen before. This sounds like a good idea but all that really manifests as is that they don't kill the possessed humans, don't really get in the Doctor's way for quite a while and then after the Doctor has defeated the Rutans, they decide to destroy the station anyway and leave without waiting to check that actually happens. 

There's an interesting diversion where Kade is challenged for leadership and he fights Colonel Sarg and I thought that perhaps Kade will loose and the Sontarans will become a serious threat but that doesn't happen. 

I should also point out the Rutans plan is insane. They plan to infect newly cloned Sontarans made on Earth. But then why would they put the spores on Saturn? Would they stop off there on their way out of the Solar System? None of that is explained and the story doesn't do anything with the idea of infected Sontarans either. If they had become infected on arrival, this may have made a good contrast to Kade's methods or maybe even lead to the Doctor aligning with both sides to prevent either from harming humanity. 

The Rutans are also idiotic, the infected people give themselves away very quickly by speaking in stilted informal language. The parts of the book dealing with the possession show this book is clearly aimed at children, they aren't hard to recognise, they are very easily defeated and they don't really attempt to hurt anyone apart from one who tries to infiltrate the Tardis. 

The side characters are fairly plain and uninteresting variety that populate children's stories. The grown ups are stuffy, slightly xenophobic, and strict towards the children. We are definitely supposed to side with Jake and Vienna's view of their lives and the book doesn't really offer any depth or contrasting views of life on Chelsea 426 other when their father spends some of the crisis with some tourists and he realises that (shock) they aren't horrible people.  

Jake and Vienna are good guest characters, we spend a lot of time with them and they never come across as annoying, as precocious children often do. There are moments where the Doctor appears a little stupid to allow them to have a greater role in resolving the plot but these moments aren't that bad, particularly since they come near the end and I'd checked out by then.  

The Tenth Doctor is well captured and there are a few references to his character arc after series 4 and here he is burying his feelings of loneliness and refusing to travel with anyone. I may have only found these character moments well done because nobody else in the book has anywhere near this much depth. 

One last thing, there is a character in the book who has been released from cryogenic suspension and has suffered from brain damage as a result. The Doctor is strangely cruel to him, basically calling him thick and that he shouldn't be allowed to have his local radio show. It felt a bit icky and doesn't add to the story but like everything else offered here, its simplistic and not well thought out.

This might seem harsh when I've read more NSA books but I can't recommend reading this one, its childish and the plot is bafflingly over complicated and nothing at the same time. There is never a sense of peril and if you go in looking for some Sontaran action, you'll be sorely disappointed. 

Rating - 3/10